


wise with great wisdom

by gogollescent



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Xeno, punny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-07
Updated: 2016-09-07
Packaged: 2018-08-13 18:22:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7981531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finrod and Andreth invent BREATHPLAY when they test who can TALK THE LONGEST</p>
            </blockquote>





	wise with great wisdom

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [absolute beginners](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4702781) by [cosmogyral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/pseuds/cosmogyral). 



> _Here it is never wholly dark but always wholly green,  
>  And the day stains with what seems to be more than the sun  
> What may be more than my flesh._

She said, “Enough,” with as much humor as might suggest she was trying to be kind. Finrod had no faith in her talent for kindness; she could be cruder than with family, with friends. “What sage hasn't outrun a suitor? Tell me something about your betrothed.”

The cold hour when larks conferred: it was as good as strong wine. It loosened her tongue and took one wall off her fortified head.

“She was older than me,” he said.

High-elves of the West didn't court widows for their farmholds. She rolled to inspect him. “Is it possible that a few hundred years made matter to a maid of the Eldar?”

There came his smile, quick and skewed high. In his lap leaned a fat gold harp: the fair metal, wheat-green, got less pale as she looked, ripening out of dawn's deepest spring. They hadn't been talking about his brother. She had been asleep, as far as she could tell, and if she was awake it was only because someone had left open the door to her dream.

“No matter,” he said. “But we thought it good to wait, when time would always bring us closer.”

“Has it?”

He widened his eyes, a trick he had from her nephews. “Time in Beleriand may have another use.”

“Ruin, wrack, and ransom,” she sing-songed, and turned her head into flat sacking. Finrod picked up the tune with three fingers, but stopped when he saw she didn't intend the first line of an impromptu lay.

“It runs short.” There was a rebuttal. “With Amarië in Eldamar, I had freedoms still to gain. In my own kingdom, by her measure, I'll be young until I die.”

He inverted his pity like a cup when it was drained. Young and then dead. Young forever; young as an insect. As usual, Andreth would have liked to snarl at him for snatching up an abandoned thing. Humility as well he had no right to. Before she could tell him, he began to play.

Not with his usual showiness: he paged through the strings with one hand. Music poured off, seeming the art, the speech of fierce neglect. Andreth was angry. The longer she listened, the more her breath ran smooth; her voice was hoarse, her nostrils crusted, but air opened with brilliance in her lungs. How was it she was only whole with an emptiness to surround? At the same time she felt she had managed the change, and had contrived her own invasion.

“Help me up,” she bit out, “and don't say, _I am—_ ” too late; he was already laughing.

 

He had arrived in time to help her oversee the death of a child. Or that was what she'd thought, when his voice breezed in under the curtain, with that controlled ebullience only elves could make polite. He was using it on the girl's father, a reserved man—but stubborn. The older boy, who had fetched Andreth, was gone now to the mother's family, and the mother had lived there since Eilinel was weaned. Their father remained. As his courageous fits were rare, he thought them counsel to be guided by.

Finrod said, “Not lightly did we name her, master.”

Andreth dribbled more tea down Eilinel's throat. “Hold her shoulders,” she told Finrod, when he had followed his nonsense into the room, and when he was close enough to speak to without turning. Obediently he went to the bed's other side and slid an arm under Eilinel.

“I brought gifts,” he said, after a pause.

“Pertinent gifts?”

“Kingsfoil.” He produced a sprig. “Backed by which, I hope, this king will sparkle.”

“...Thank you. I've been going upstream, in case the creek here is tainted. For _athelas_ you'll want a fresh pot.”

“No doubt!”

When she had gotten as much of the willow tea into and onto Eilinel as she could, he went to fill the ewer. He returned quickly, and she guessed he'd ignored her advice about the water.

“Sorry,” he said, catching her glance. “But I don't believe this is a pestilence—of that nature.”

“ _Of nature_ , you mean?” asked Andreth, reaching to brush a switch of hair from Eilinel's forge-hot brow.

“Yes.”

It was strange to live the folly of the siege: resigned to the Shadow, and doubting its least emergence. But to her own mind she was Andreth, always, a thing that would fail or prosper without help. She had forgotten she could be opposed.

“I have wasted the morning.”

“Do you think so?” he asked idly. He was rubbing the leaves between thumb and forefinger. To Andreth, a sachet of lakeshore: the smell of warm-rimmed water and above it, boundless air. Sweetgrass shook its tassels in play-fury where she passed—she who stomped, ran, and once had knelt.

“If she dies,” Finrod said, “ _that_ will be natural. Hröa is fëa's best protector. We must help it, where we can.”

So the sun descended by rungs of cloud, clinging white-knuckled to the rope; and, closer to earth, that great sailor relaxed, and let the blood rush back to her sore fingers. Also at dusk, stars of sweat came out on Eilinel.

“Careful.”

Andreth hadn't felt like talking for much of the afternoon, but she would talk to head off more advice. “How did you come here?” she asked. “You didn't seek me first with my uncle, I believe.”

The dignity of the Eldar: they could cringe feelingly, but declined to twitch. “I was with Angrod,” he said. “I had a dream.”

“Angrod! I see. How fare he and Edhellos?”

Alone of all things living, he was amazed to be alarmed by her. She cut him off before he could lie, and said, “What was your dream of?”

“You. You and an evil spirit.”

Eilinel screamed. Andreth had been sponging down the girl's brown back and sides; when Eilinel reared off the bed, Andreth was the one to catch her. “Wait,” Finrod said, but there was nothing to hold off from. Andreth saw the gray eyes open, the first they had done since Finrod came, and she wondered at their power. The girl had put together, out of scarce materials, a mask of sad apology. Wearing it, she pushed her face to Andreth's ear. In the same instant Finrod wrenched with foreign strength at Andreth's arms, breaking the embrace; and, further, dragged her from the bed. Andreth thought, that's wrong. If it is Eilinel, I should listen. Eilinel is a good girl, braver than her father. In any event she hadn't tried to speak; all Andreth still heard was her panting, that rough hush.

 

“When you said I'd live long, you didn't say that it would be by your constant intercession.”

He hadn't helped her up, except to let her sit and take water. It was disconcerting to find herself in Eilinel's position. She hadn't hoped to form the child's effigy. He hadn't told her, either, where Eilinel and her father had gone, although he claimed Eilinel was 'well.' The dugout seemed to shrink rather than grow with just them in it. She had remembered that it was absurd to be waited on by a king—what was more, by a king who couldn't keep the fire going. She might entertain Felagund in her uncle's hall without shame, if in the prickling knowledge that he viewed stains and tapestries with equal interest; but here, they were two fearsome guests, who had crowded out their host. She felt like a conspirator, crouched in the lee of her strength.

“Not so,” said Finrod. “Had I not come, Eilinel might have died and the spirit with her. Bound to her fëa, it would have left the circles of the world.”

Andreth sniffed.

“Or you might have conquered it alone,” Finrod went on. He lacked even the grace to look away. “Such deeds are not unheard-of. For the firm of will...”

“Plainly not firm enough.” She couldn't picture anything from after Finrod drew her back. No, that wasn't true; she knew he must have moved Eilinel and laid her out on the bed, careless of the yellowing impress of vomit, and she could picture that, his hands curved hard under her shoulders. “I slept the night through? What does that mean?”

“Like all his folk, it hates the sun.”

“And now, we're alone?” She gestured from her face out to her chest, and he glanced away.

“Maybe. Close to it. Be patient with me. Eilinel was scant shelter for a wraith, and you're a warren.”

“Tribute deserved, from the trapper with ferrets.”

“I promise you, I _am_ the ferret,” said Finrod. He gave the spot between her eyes a cheerful tap. “Though less often loosed than you guess! Your thoughts are your own, I swear—in their deep places—”

“—save when a wild thing beds down with them.”

“Well.”

“No oath at all, in that case.”

“Troth is the death of trust, they say. Though, indeed, I didn't spend all night wandering Andreth. Sluggard that I am, I set a watch at the mouth.”

He spoke fluently. He had confused his metaphors. Was he that weary? She said, “I'm tired, Finrod, I can't think. What are you dangling?”

If his face couldn't betray him, there should have been a nod for her true aim. But he'd set aside those ginger attentions he paid at their meetings and partings; he was pompous, ruthless, very close.

“Nothing whatsoever. If you're tired, sleep and be refreshed.”

“Spoken like—”

“—an Elven-lord, but even among Bëor's folk have ye no quarter for the sick? Eilinel, had you not cured her: would you have had her up at dawn to milk the goats?”

“She's young for it. I would have had to prop her up. Did I _cure_ her?”

Finrod's mouth turned down. “That too you've mislaid?”

“I remember tripping a snare,” said Andreth, honestly.

“Tripping a— _I warned you._ ”

“What, 'wait'?"

“And you were clear enough in your intent,” he added, ignoring her.

“You bring me, as it seems, strange news from afar.”

He didn't return the smile. “I honor your wish to save her life,” he said. “At any price. But you were rash to act, when, as I learn, you had no certainties.”

“Had Eilinel died, if not for my mistake?”

“She was dead when you breathed it out of her.”

It wasn't that she found a new limb amid memory's tangle, while he talked. It was as though she were watching it sprout. Eilinel, slumped on her side, breath slow and shallow. Andreth, beside her, rode the jolting pleasure—not of work finished—of work still to be done. And Finrod on his knees had said,

“It's not enough.”

“You—”

“It's in too deep. I sing, and I'm only chasing it downward.”

Andreth had been thinking of justified hope: of the evening given over to watching Eilinel, checking her tongue and pulse. Good news to be brought to the father at midnight, out in the roofed pen where he slept. Andreth, with some irritation, felt her heart jump up in protest. Almost as much to forestall its cry as to see what could be done for the child, she leaned forward.

Eilinel didn't scream. Eilinel was already slack-limbed. Andreth kissed her open, drying mouth.

 

“Dead. _Dead_?”

“Not now. I started her heart.”

And Andreth had slept through it. “This is why you're angry?” she asked the daylight Finrod, cross-legged on scattered rushes.

“I would fain have you rest,” Finrod replied, “if it would help you.”

“So you said, in care for my health. I'm not sick. What if I do sleep, will I wake?”

“Whether you have woken _once_ remains to be learned. Shall I test you? But I think both Saelind and her visitor would cheat.”

“Remind me what the spirit is,” Andreth said, boredly. It was an old game: remind me, what is death?

“I have guesses.” He leaned as though to guard the gleaming treasure in his lap. He'd stopped playing, when she said, Dead? Had she not schemed for years to curb his generosity? “It must have had a mind and lost it. Being cored, it fell apart. It may—there are among the Enemy's ranks greater and lesser angels. Of the meanest, he sacrifices some on the anvil, which broken give off a great smoke. The little self, the shining glede, he plants in an orc or a warg. For the rest, the fog of power...”

“Men are his dew-trap?”

“Not often. You know the Eldar sicken not, nor fear corruption. Yet you weren't our only teachers, in matters of disease. Among us there have come elves who raved, and spewed up poison, and who passed on a measure of their trouble, by and by.”

“Escaped prisoners.”

“Yes. Really escaped, in one sense: unlike the spies he sent later, secrets told them were very safe. But without being ruled, they suffered... were lit with hate from a fiend's last struggle, and with a strength not fitted to their flesh.”

“That was long hence,” Andreth observed. “Wasn't it? And you—” she nodded to his instrument “—fashioned weapons against it.”

Finrod laid his harp aside. “No weapons.” He wavered. “Maybe you would say, the life of elves is an armory. But I came to you without a soldier's confidence, that some foe or another must meet me in the field. East of the sea, no storm suffices; nothing will leach the evil from this country. For all I knew, Eilinel caught ablaze without flame, like a straw touched to the kiln.”

Andreth waited; she was thinking of her memory.

“If I'm afraid,” Finrod said, “I'm afraid of his leisure. Despite himself he helped to make the world. His furlough now is older than the ice across the sea. He dares nothing, he broods, and still, with one eye shut, he births such horrors as should be too slight for him to feel, though he held them cupped. He rehilts old wrongs, beneath the summer hills.... If this was chance—chance too thinks for him. And I would be gladder to have war again than to see him bend his thought to the death of a child.”

“You speak freely to me,” Andreth said, “who you have feared would hurry to his worship.”

“ _You_?” A shift in the set of his ears, in what she took for peevishness, if not amusement: the gold in them clinked. She was amused as well. He had rebuked her once for forgetting beasts, had reproved “the Eldar” for forgetting men—but truly, elves were men with beasts' lithe shadows. Men had invented hound-headed warriors, and maids with serpents' trains. When they met things that could speak in the wood, a lesser rift had suturing. The fugitives from out of tales were men with a hollow between the bones of the leg, with large ears, long faces, no hair at all on piscine bright bodies or else, as in the older Avari, fine fur. Elves settled men into their proper frame, although men had hoped to rattle loose, and be shorn of sparse roots.

Finrod said, “I would sooner suspect you of hastening to mine. But you—you would have him fell enough to head the world's drum. Therefore you can be wrong, and Morgoth mighty.”

What a bad pun. Small cause had Bëor to associate Finrod with the clan of ghosts, and scavengers in the greenwood. Finrod wanted their jackal's lope. Finrod went robed in silk, bore a harp with him hunting, and from each side his eyes could be seen to sprout light after nightfall, like warm breath at year's end. In the Noldor too were men lashed to the earth: to cliffs, the sea, deep abysses, and ice.

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

“I'm listening. You sound like yourself.”

“And that's not enough?” Before he could answer: “You should know—” She told him about her double memory, the boughs entwined. They really had grown together. In the one moment, she heard Eilinel breathing. In the next, a spirit throbbed in the dead mouth.

“So it covers its tracks,” he said when she was done.

“It tried.”

“Can you really believe you know everything you've forgotten?”

She laughed aloud, but he was grave. She came up short against the fact that his reluctance to help her had been what was real. His promises rang hollow, not because he was Finrod, but because he was lying.

“Why not tell me what I've misplaced?”

“How can I? _I_ don't know,” he snapped. “You like games.” He reached for her, two-handed, and covered her eyes with one palm. She let him, interested. His other hand went under her nose. “What do you smell?”

She grabbed his wrist but didn't push down. “Nothing. Cold.”

If she'd been thinking straight, she would have guessed his ploy. As it was he had to pull away to show her the crushed _athelas_.

“Will you keep me here till I admit to being mad?” she said, with some surprise.

“Andreth.” His deep unease was better than bluster; better than tranquility, which might have hidden grief.

“What did I do in the night? How many times have I woken?”

But she hadn't pressed her advantage with sufficient force. “I will keep you here,” Finrod announced, “until I know you're well, or till I know how to heal you. If you're dead and speaking in your grave, I'll know that, too. It's been half an hour.”

“Are you calling me hasty?”

He covered his mouth and squeezed. She knew more than one way to disarm him. The stratagems of twenty years were diversely ineffective, but together, traded one for the next, quick as he got his guard up, she could make him tired. “Half an hour,” she went on, “time enough to die. Are you a good judge?”

“What do you mean?”

“Of my continued survival. As a boy, Bregor had a story about you keeping Bëor, until he was only bones.”

“Did you believe him?”

“At the time, I refused to believe that elves existed.”

Finrod's hand on his jaw still held a smile. His ears had pricked up. He would be thinking of the real Bëor, when she wanted to demonstrate a principle. An elf's friendship was half-entailed: owed to your children, then to their young children. That being so, did he care most for Andreth, or for a pitch of intimacy he couldn't but retrieve, and had come to like a wave out of its hollow? Bëor's bones in Andreth's face. Finrod's liking for her family gave a muddled clue to how elves lived with elves—not rating separation over the prodigal's reemergence, in fifty years, with a new name and a tarnished character. Their love a season, like their coldness. Maybe Finrod, too, had seemed another person to Bëor, gaily unburdened by such fear as he strove to feel for men, scenting their terror.

_I had freedoms still to gain._

Was he eavesdropping? Maybe he really had hidden Bëor's rotting body. She tried, “To elves all joys are always new. So how should you know a new thing when you meet one? Say, a possessed Andreth?”

His brow creased. “An I meet a _joy_ , I'll interrogate her.”

She might have spooned the joke onto his lips, as she'd nursed Eilinel. She nodded anyway. Finrod went on: “You go very quickly from scorning my caution to...”

“Scorning your caution, both little and late?” Wasn't it ever my way to plunge from pride to proud surrender, she almost asked, but he'd think she repented of her folly: safest not mock it. “I'm confused. I talk, if you like, to order my mind.”

“That's why you talk?”

“One question. You told me Bauglir strips his angels of their power. If power's all that's in me, why—why do you fear—”

“Imposture?” He had to think. After a moment, he said, “It's not exactly that. Fëa and hröa aren't one. But they resemble each other. For the holy ones I spoke of, the division is more strange. That they _are_ divided, I don't doubt: everything which speaks, lives in two parts. It may be how we learn to.”

Years ago, she had asked why elves used language, who touched minds. He had said: for the joy of it, as we make art. She opened her mouth. Finrod's voice rose: “So it's true, you do talk because you're torn.”

“That sounds like a metaphor.” They had spoken before of words' insufficiency, and now he proposed words as the bridge between body and spirit. Touch halves together, let them scrape. By habit, she understood him, without believing a rag of what he claimed to believe. The body rebelled, suffered, and hardened, but was lost to its silence. _In elves, fëa is master of hröa._ And was that speech? She felt at the destroyed plaits in her hair and began to take them down, having unpinned her veil.

Finrod said warmly, “I learn from you. Now. Angels. What's split in them? Not exactly—the brittle shell from the enduring. You were made for more than strength, though you may find it hard to part with. In the coming years.” He had a fund of warnings for the maiden, lest she be taken unawares. Grey had rimed her bough-black hair, and he gave out grave warnings. It was lucky for Finrod someone had told him the world was marred. “The might of the angels isn't like that. Even without a wielder, power finds purpose. It hopes perhaps for a return, though as far as I know there's no cure for such sunderings.”

“I had worried a particular warg might snap me up.”

“Maybe, if it braved our leaguer. But the meal would do it small good.”

“Comfort on comfort. Might I not slip my guard and fly to it?”

“Tell me if your feet itch.” That had a strange ring in Sindarin. “But your wishes may be natural, and yet corrupt. Your desire to see Eilinel, for example. You do want to see her? The warg might run south, I don't know. But you'd only go to it if Andreth wanted to wrestle a wolf.”

“Then perhaps we should look, not at how I behave, but to what I inspire in you.”

Finrod got up to pace. She felt burdened by his light footsteps; she would sink into the pallet. His hands he clasped over his mouth, one finger raised and tapping a nostril. In spite of that, an imposing figure. Fairly stern. But when he raised his head, and although the fair brows were arched and the mouth set in a good approximation of coolness, his eyes jumped like a pulse—started and sank in, rather than flowing smoothly. Had any part of his face hung slack, she could have called it nervousness. He was laughing at her. He said, “Hope. As ever.” Two steps closer; he had also to turn on his heel and retrieve the harp. “Will you play for me?”

Believing what he did of her, Finrod laughed most when he didn't care whether he gave offense. Which was often. He knew that for men as for elves the harp was not a woman's instrument. He had no interest in her accomplished music. He thought only to hear what she couldn't keep back, lacking the skill.

Andreth swung one leg off the bed. “My feet itch,” she said.

She didn't consider his excitement an insult. Only it was like a blister in glass. Oh, Finrod was irked, he was angry, angry while he laughed. He was projecting it telepathically. And? Her mood had such a clarity that it hid nothing from her, although she couldn't reach around its edge. On the contrary, it made what she saw more permeable, and lent a thrust of depth to empty air. She was poised for a fall. She would fall a long time between the limed walls of the dugout.

Although the idea of a high place, too, might be a way of holding back: trapping herself on one dizzy moment. When she stared, whitewash divided into a mountain flower; she was sick, somewhere high, and time would carry her down. Andreth strapped in a great sling. Finrod had seized her arm again. Maybe it was his favorite feature.

 _Sick, afraid_. It would be a pleasure to think 'in reality'—somewhere outside the parade of images, the bright tunnel her life had dug—in reality, her anger, too, was only a piece of failed reserve. There the inward tumult was, if necessary, then excessive. Like loremasters' long arguments. What counted was, rage boiled off to leave a mask like Finrod's. The face downturned, the shoulders hunched. When she died, a finished mask was what Finrod must bear away. The doll _Saelind,_ not this erupted, hollow chamber. Him there in it. Though she felt she had grown to the size of the room. The room with him seemed to be all she was, at the present time.

Now suppose—

 

They had last disputed six months earlier. The older she grew, the less compelled he felt to bait her, and the less she enjoyed learning, most by chance, what stung his pride. The Valar, Manwë, the Valar and the Light! He had deserted such lords that it took subtlety _not_ to ensnare him. His flights of zeal daunted as they bored, when she could have been hearing him on the life of the Edain. At other times, sieving loose impressions through the mesh of vanity, she thought, he knows not what it is to twist one's life into a taper. Light enough for a page of an atlas, a dozen questions, the eye to flex then falter with the chronicler's faint hand. As such, he knows nothing. Through plenty, he's lost the good habits of ignorance, that bites itself, may be turned on itself, and strikes red sparks off lies.

And how he loved her.

It was possible to think, in memory. The spirit, maybe, hung by to overhear, but that unease was part of the boast. He was very tender, not knowing how to be.

They had discussed the memory of the Eldar. He had said, as always, anything. She handed him a clay donkey, a child's toy. He felt it, eyes shut—he pressed his lips together, too, but lapsed open-mouthed to a grin at the sound of her voice. She said, “That? Forever?” Yes, he claimed, down to the lumpen ears.

Excitement smoothed her over, where she'd been prepared to tease him. “But I know you,” she said. “You change your opinion over trifles.”

“How should that hinder memory?”

Then she was wary, and had to recount how men's learning could wear away at what had been. The past alone, as well as the past-made-future, would grow stale. Worse, you could examine a place or prized hour and find it intact, but yourself—yourself, and your joy allied to bitter derision.

Finrod said, “I see what was, not only what I saw. I am not the prisoner of my first ideas. And nor are you, it sounds like.”

Rather, he must have chosen words to that effect.

“Never mind,” she said, struggling. “But so, whatever the sentence, you never lose your senses' testimony, although your home may be taken from you, your limbs hewn off, and your body broken. So. Does that seem likely?” He held her gaze with failing indulgence, which peeling surface proved that he was not indulgence through. She went on. “Let me tell you, perfect memory has no part in our lore. Why should it? What need has he who lives for what was formerly of use to him? No: it smacks of a forgiven error. Ye and not we, surely, were a poor amends for Arda.”

His lashes had dropped, his lips parted, he might have been sleeping upright. Having bargained on dredging up a smile, she had to extend her line instead to test the depth of frank distaste. She went on: “That donkey has its hopes of endlessness in you.”

“Not endlessness.”

So then, sounding _her_ invention, and because he would have it so, she lowered Finrod into rain-gouged mud, near the end of everything. Through the fine smoke of that deluge, she studied him, admiring. Finrod. Largely unscathed, because she couldn't imagine him wounded. Indignant—why? At the mess? Andreth there too, sealed in Finrod. Andreth blind, dumb, insensible, undreaming.

“Does the spirit govern memory?” she asked, having mercy on him, because it was a way to beat off dread. “Attrition aside, men lose all knowledge of themselves by misadventure. Fever has done it, or an unlucky blow.”

She had argued with Aegnor about field surgery, combat losses, the duties of peace and war, but their disputes had largely turned on unlike definitions. In the Exiles, damage to the brain healed in hours, or it killed. Finrod was clearly groping for a close analogy. “There are skills the hand learns, which the intellect—”

“Skilled hands, the victims keep.”

They embarked on a three hour inventory of memory's constituent parts. Winding down, Finrod had said, “You might instead ask: 'is memory of Arda?' That material ills occasion such a loss doesn't prove that the loss is material. Or, if it is, it doesn't show that fëa has no role—in commanding—requiring—consenting to the loss, which then would take the character of a setting-aside, and a pact between spouses. You have spoken most of the spirit's love for the body, the spirit molded by the house. In your defense of the body. But it is not contempt to say that what was dust can change itself, given due cause. House protects in-dweller, more than passively, and with cunning. This seems unnatural, but accords with His design: anything long loved may love.”

 

She shook him off and stood. Said again, “My feet itch. And I'm hungry. And the sun is—”

Nowhere. The billowing stuff in the window had gone to gathered grey, as though since dawn they'd leaned away, lost the sheen on cobweb's silk. She thought too that the other bank dipped down as at a weight of distance, sprang up again unladen only when she found her feet—tall at dawn, charged with rose-color, it now was tall but separate, charging east. No, that was wind that pawed the heather. How to think the ridge above swift water didn't move?

“—high,” Finrod finished. “Too high for such as us, at present. I know. A little patience, please. I didn't plan well for a siege. You won't play? Dance with me.” He made a silly, nodding bow, not of a piece with his abrupt grace. He had produced a sparrow's or a soldier's nimbleness.

For dancing-distance, they should have chosen opposite corners, but there was no working around the low bed. They started at the front and the back of the room. He pushed off from the doorframe like a swimmer; he was humming, high and clear, which thread led her feet. She walked to him. Meeting, his left hand brushed her waist, while her hand in his went out as to draw a veil. They spun and parted. She took his place by the door and the hole of a window. She could have darted out, if she liked, though he would rush to drag her back.

They were partnered irregularly in Belemir's hall. He dances quite as well as he talks, Adanel said once, when Andreth was a new fixture in that household. Andreth's smiles were at that time tempting game, to a family of hunters. But also Adanel and Belemir acted toward Finrod as toward no one else, with easy admiration, so open it rebuffed. Finrod might be as direct or as shrewd as he liked; there was nowhere to get into, the doors had been thrown wide.

Andreth had found she grew colder the more gently Adanel joked. At that time, she had still been young, and she had had thoughts like: I'm not a hound, to be coaxed when it thunders. Or she was, and had the hound's old right to wear her throat out barking; had too its discontent at master's calm. Fear, wide fear, and a thorn underneath it. The safety was real, the danger lay without, farther perhaps than could ever be faced, but how—so Adanel's kindness became the thorn: love to travel all of fear with her, vexing her greatly.

“Where's Eilinel?” she asked again, when next they crossed. At his face she grasped his hand and made one circle three. “In the forest? Why should the spirit seek her, having abandoned her? Finrod. You'll give it ideas.”

He drew his brows together. “Ah,” said Andreth, “and with her father, wherever she is. Am I right? It didn't try to share itself between Eilinel and I, yet... Has it some use for her father, owning me?”

“You might do me a service,” Finrod said, breaking the tune. “Ponder less.”

“But when I ponder I don't crave an answer.” A lie. Worse, she craved _the answer she had made,_ even when that was no answer at all. She could think of nothing but the broken pieces in her hand. “How is it,” she added, gliding forward, the song-clew still unwinding in her thought, “we've talked through a hundred nights, and I can't bear the day with you?”

Some calculation in his glance. “You haven't had breakfast.”

There were stories Adanel wouldn't share. Fewer than Andreth had suggested to Finrod, but that didn't soothe Andreth. Nor did she care that Adanel was as reticent with her own sons. Adanel laid the duties of Belemir's wife alongside lore, knowledge feeding into and off of her labors; and she kept her people's tales apart, in some bright kernel, to protect them from—not even time. From Adanel's own will to treat with time. From the hope of truce, that tore all truth to gain it. Andreth understood that. But Adanel was also her friend.

She crossed her feet, uncrossed them, presented herself to Finrod with an arm above her head. Finrod matched her step for step, ridiculously bent under the sod roof. His breath had quickened, a flush proved possible across high cheekbones: summoned maybe, like the smile, and yet sustained by weightlessness, something outside his will. She chased the truth every day of her life, and the world smiled. Never. Not you. Someone, somewhere, to ride it down, on the open plain—to you a wood. It had started to rain.

Never mind her bones, then, and the image of her that he would not be rid of; nothing less than wakefulness unbroken was enough. Waking again. “Hunger?” she said, marveling. “My lord. You accuse me of hunger, which Eru plants in us to point to health? How could hunger bore me?” Every good she was owed, he simply was. His doom signified nothing; Arda's, less; there was in her that which always clawed. With each moment, clawed out. “If I could,” she told him, “I would steal your life. Climb inside you, rule you, not to die.” Had she not said to the dark, a thousand times—in the moment before death, I will not die, but be borne from myself, still as myself: any vessel would serve, for that slight burden. “Do you doubt it?”

She had quit the dance, except she swayed. His accompaniment lagged also. The notes stood alone, stars at first light. “I doubt Andreth,” he said. “Who'd die before she sent a stranger forward in her stead.”

“I'm not proposing a stranger.”

“Before she sold a nuisance! Healer!” His hand tightened on her back.

She lowered her forehead to his shoulder, rested it there. Tired out in three turns. She felt him breathe in, after a forgetful interval; she had forgotten his reserve. “Shouldn't you kill me? If I am so unlike. Do you have to kill me?” she asked, not really thinking, maundering to speak. “You could dig a great pit, throw down scraps. This is no match for you.”

To her surprise, he brought his free hand up to stroke her hair. He was rougher than he had any cause to be. His marching feet encouraged more green shoots than they crushed, and here he was, knuckles denting her temple. His calluses tugged.

“Kill you?” he said, apparently to no one. “This is the longest you've remained yourself.”

Maybe she was a mouthful.

She was back to the question of Eilinel's father. Eilinel had been thin fare, Andreth, tough. Ingrim had taken a farmer's daughter to wife and they had made each other miserable, cooped up in this small house. Andreth knew only what was hard not to know, as neighbors in Ladros, but by all accounts the bride hadn't left for want of his trying to please her. Ingrim made a sturdy virtue of silence; unstopped long-stemmed and long-stored, cloudy sentences, when he did speak. He didn't mention his wife, if he could help it, so the pride he took in staunchness would have mystified Finrod the more. Finrod must have told him to keep close, in case of accidents.

“Moreover, I have treatments still to try, as befits a skillful leech. Don't you know—” he jogged her elbow “—this is a working?” She squinted up at him, and found she was looking at a shadow on his neck.

He must have seen some coolness clasp her face. “Come,” he said. “A little longer.” He drew her back into dancing-formation.

Andreth slipped. Sincerely so, in that she would have fallen if he hadn't caught her; and when he caught her, she flung an arm round his shoulders and slid her hand under his hair. And lunged upward, not too far. His collarbone and hot, thin skin reflected her heartbeat into her cheek. “I bit you?” she said, muffled, staring at the marks. There were more than one. There was a bruise beneath his ear. He thrust her away, none too gentle, but her hand stayed wound through his hair, so fine it clung.

His face had gone blank with intent. The hand he'd run over _her_ hair opened and shut at his side. She had seen that from him before, confronted with a problem new to him, and showing himself king of smiths at the last.

“Yes,” he said. “You were most fierce.”

Red to the neck and the marks grown redder. The trouble with lying for his own titillation, lying when he'd worked himself to a panic like belief, was that if blithe conviction wouldn't serve, he couldn't lie at all. She swept her thumb across a stippled bruise and he jerked back. “Rough wooing,” she observed.

That helped him, more than humoring him could have. The flush faded. His hand stilled in a fist and he brought it up to pound his shoulder, his distracted relief a physical barrier, like the grip he had on her. “It wasn't you.”

She started laughing. “But Finrod, your words—it has all my wishes. _In dream many desires are revealed._ ”

“Don't mock me,” he said, and let go. The laughter took time to run out. As not to look at him, she threw her gaze everywhere, on the cold hearth, the cracked chamberpot, the rain that sloped to darken green rushes. Finrod said, “Don't—think you that you must mock, having no sword?”

What did that mean?

But this was wrong. This interest, mild and sour, was out of joint with his distress and even her disquiet. His expression had closed, late, and she no longer heard his breath. But sure, Andreth thought, she had smoked out a barbed limb of the demon. Knowing which, her heart sped, her mouth dried, her vision narrowed, clapped between a pair of downy wings. And the calm kept its seat. It rode above self-pity as it had ridden guilt, and she recognized... something she had never renounced: not because she didn't understand why she should, but because of the pleasure it gave her, and the joy of victory.

She said, “I ask your pardon.”

“Granted.” He had lowered himself to sit on the end of the bed, and at the weight his harp slid into him, like a pet begging comfort. “I hope I have yours. I should have taken thought for how time moves, to men. Haste isn't our vice.”

If she'd kissed him, had that been done to communicate the evil? But she felt strongly that it was her willingness which had had opened her to the spirit, when her will would have defended her. The kiss was the token. Thinking that made her want to repeat the experiment. If she did, he would put her back to sleep.

The wind changed such that less rain entered, which had the contrary effect of reminding her to have a care for Ingrim's floor; she drew closed one shutter. “Shall we start a fire?”

“You're cold?” he said, probing, so she shook her head. And shivered. Ordinarily he would have argued with her, which was insolence, and which he did without any faith in the hurt which she concealed—how could anyone take chill in south Beleriand, asked his sprawl, while his tongue tolled out, Aren't you, aren't you cold? Now he accepted her answer. He rubbed the outer curve of the harp's crosspiece, and his foot, too, drew and improved upon a curve, diverted her to an awareness of his legs beneath the robe. Slightly spread, braced as if he'd stand. She thought he had already chosen to do as she proposed, and bury her alive. Ten, twenty years from now he would be at the ready; ready to pardon her, who was not Andreth.

She was afraid he'd kill her in the afternoon. He didn't seem to know what he was doing.

“In your dream,” she said, “did you see this far?”

“It wasn't raining, if that's what you mean. It was by—” There followed a word that meant nothing to her, and which she nearly took for a mangling of 'Eilinel.' “You waded in. You hurt yourself,” he said. “That sort of thing. Some of it dealt with deeds long past, and some with what is not now possible.”

“Your Music, muffled?”

“Before we had much converse with the Valar,” he said, “and even after, the Quendi had their own theories of the world. We compared it to the things that we ourselves had made: the Falmari, to a great ship, and the Vanyar, rightly, to a song. And for many years the Noldor spoke of a jewel, formed under weight which fractures it. Scarred into greater growth.”

“A crystal is a sterile mansion for the life of Ëa.”

“Fëanor made the Silmarils with air, shells, dew—though he burnt the shells, and I don't speculate as to his use for the flowers. But to speak of foresight. The stuff of gems always grows to one pattern, though on no loom. They aren't hostage to crises, but reassert their clarity; except that around the cleaving plane— _because_ change is perceptible, it makes a wall—”

It was the sort of game with words he liked, unless she harried him to exactness. The habit of the Firstborn wasn't to eschew comparison, as he sometimes implied, but rather, like a proud steward, to take any excuse for the mention of other lands, other possessions. Whether he spoke of a fiction or a prize in the hand, he swiftly grew attached: he was certainly seeing the round stone, its fire frayed, inclusions a hedge across which light could slink but raggedly. Andreth said, “I'm more enticed by the ship. Who captains?”

“The ship's my choice,” he admitted. “I have often envied seafarers. And it's striking: from what we know of Arda, its basins and heights, it has a mast, a deck, a hull.”

She went to sit beside him on the bed. Take me outside, she wanted to say, you can draw in the dirt with a stick. She had waited almost until her knees gave out, and probably couldn't have gotten up if he'd offered her his arm. The arrangement of shutters put much of him in gloom; with hands clasped in his lap, new light edged up his knuckles like another hand, covering his. “When I mauled you in the night,” she said. “Was I strong?”

He turned. She leaned further, and he sat back, one arm going out to support him. She couldn't touch him anywhere. Her mouth had come apart, undone—from how it trembled, a permanent rent. Tilting her head made him mirror her, faithful as an enemy; and, still craning away, he touched her cheek, at which she would have relented, but he kissed the side of her mouth. She sighed, and his eyes opened, bitter, before he dug his hands into her hair.

Not a good kiss. At least, she couldn't stand to think so, when she was already, by her own error, rapt in it. Best was how he fit into her arms. Though she thought that, and he eased his lip against hers, lightening and changing the demand. It feathered down her spine. Hand's heaviness, a pen-point slither, written under skin. This thrill that she'd distrusted, cold or on the verge of sleep—now she gardened it, it burst again in her. This time when she made to draw away he noticed. He twisted free and dropped on his elbow, and, although she expected it, didn't scramble back from her.

Long hair in his face. It was hard to look at him, not least because she kept trying to fit it into memory. Had he looked like this? Would he look so again? The missing time with Eilinel had come when it was called, but this was a mere emptiness. His nose wrinkled, the tears clung to his eyes—when she had seen him weep at children's songs, not turning colors. Short breaths sped to laughter, then he gulped and wiped his mouth.

She said, “I suppose I wouldn't have had to hold you down.”

“Have you no loyalty?”

She had never deserved his venom as she did his shame. It was a new sting to sympathize. Less with Finrod, still, righteous and kingly, than with Andreth, who must endure the pangs of a just rebuke. And there was someone else. “How is he?” she asked. “You did—you came from him?”

This time Finrod didn't cringe. He said something she couldn't hear over the roar in her ears, and didn't need to hear. A spirit of wrath. Not dead yet. She was familiar with how he grieved for Aegnor. With thwarted rage, she felt again the happiness in which she'd woken... the cool depth of it, joy that hid its desires, so it could not be denied.

Loyalty: yes. If she had been forced to it—if Aegnor had loved her. She too could have been faithful, made to harbor perfect trust. Instead she had been told that she was free. Free to fail only, which was freedom's single proof; and to want what sovereignty did not grant her, which was to live two lives. If she had been immortal, Aegnor might never have wanted her. She had come to believe that his kind _were_ cursed, against all evidence of their good fortune, which sky and earth had both been cursed to conquer. And so maybe she was the curse on him, and love his wound. Had he permitted it, she would have sucked the bite till her lips turned black. What was it to her? She was poisoned!

“There was a time,” she said, “when I thought you my reward. Andreth paid in her own coin: not love, nor warmth, but wisdom, and blind hope to make sport with blind despair.

“...But then I found you knew. You knew and came. You're colder than I, Finrod. You're colder than anyone.”

He started to protest. Quick anger, temperance, sun-roughened skin—and she thought, Frost. However many Ages he would survive her by, she was glad not to have been before the sun first rose. She kissed him, which didn't prevent his saying, “If I was wrong—” And stopping. The cold all down her front from where he'd warmed her. No courage now could match the fact that he had kissed her first.

“Well?”

Standing, he scooped her up with him. She leaned back on the girding arm to look at his bright, open mouth. She felt he likewise didn't know what they would do together: there was in betrayal some chance, not promised, not withheld.

He said, “If I am wrong, I would do worse to take you with me.”

“Finrod,” she said seriously, “I'm in thrall to a dark spirit.”

At his expression she had to kiss him more. Up on the balls of her feet, and he couldn't but partner her, having trained himself to bargain in any language she'd hear. Shorter and stockier than his brother, than most High-elves. He made as though to teach by yielding. She thought very sorrowfully, oh, _Finrod,_ and had to grin into his mouth, at which he looked offended. He pulled at her, drew her stumbling with him, and she said: “But have you ever doubted that I was—a demon, and a prisoner?”

Because he was impetuous, she saw herself through his eyes for an answer. Andreth overheard, and read in reverse, and surprised in what should have been privacy from at least herself—more stern than the lady of the mirror's house, she yet seemed gripped with crooked mirth, not from any feeling, but from helpless strangeness. Her eyes cut from her face with flying strokes. The delicate long crow's feet, which nearly clasped her hairline. _A star caught in thy hair_ , but the clouds had cleared, the rain drawn up, so she found countless gleams.

They had staggered the few steps to the wall, against which Finrod threw himself more than was pushed. A sad corruption of the dance. His memory of Andreth hung like sweet, maddening incense, had to be waved off. Finrod said rapidly, “I don't think the spirit rules you now.”

“Why?” she said. “Because you're conscious?” He bit his lip, which meant he wasn't listening. “A kiss I know you can withstand,” she said. “At least, on the mouth.”

He didn't quite smile, but his face grew softer from warmth kept to himself. “And the throat.”

“Should we see where else?”

She lowered her face to the bow of his neck, mouthed a bruise she had made, lifted her head again, and set her hand there. Raising her other hand, she licked the palm. He turned his groan into a cough; the iron hold on her ribs tightened. All through it his eyes slid and were dragged in, like trying to break your reflection's stare. To encourage candor, she reached down and pressed the dry backs of two fingers against his belly, stroking in. He shunted his weight as though in bed with a sharp stone; his legs fell open, pulling him down the wall.

It settled her to touch him. When he said her name, she had to keep doing it, although seeing her face he bit his lip. His cock was somehow hotter than her tongue had been. She hoped the embroidery stung him. She had never done anything like this before, except lavishly and in dreams, or more often nightmares that began well. It took longer awake. Time, in fact, took longer, like time without music, or time in the cold; she watched his face twist, she willed him not to stay silent. A part of her was sure anyway. What she'd wanted to do, she had already done. That she wanted more was like missing a step, running not to fall. It was more—it was more than she would have thought necessary, in the pride of her youth. Sex preoccupied her then—in a surge of sweetness, she acknowledged how much: even now, she loved Aegnor no more than she had as a girl. She had loved him then with an absolute thoroughness, knowing everywhere they would go. But she had coaxed herself along without real attention. There was the buoying fall, and her body broke it. Not release, but a bond snapped back. Now she had no trust, and dared nothing; this lunge at nothing used the straining rope.

His gaze had drifted. He threw his hips into her hand. She kept considering his shoulders, that the wall held straight, and finally she took her hand from his neck to work it under them. When he jerked her closer, she sank against his thigh, where her scrunched skirt fended her off, bled out all friction, and drove her to hitch her hips higher; heavy as arousal was, a precarious lightness spread through her chest. Her hand was trapped. If Finrod would only do more than mark up the meat of her back.

But he stayed rocking, slow and compulsive, until she got her hand out and set it on his hip. Then he writhed of his own accord. One ear curled in—she had been stretching to kiss it, in fact, but at that she laughed so hard she had to stop, not to bite her tongue. She wanted to bite the overdeveloped muscles around the base. And the ear, too, though she must work around his ornaments. The thought of that mouthful, metal rings pushed together, pinching her tongue—she tried to even out her laughter: there was saliva under her tongue. Steady huffs on licked skin had him hissing, then stopping to glare; she was taken aback by how much he could feel. He reached upward, and the heels of both hands grazed her neck, something like going into water, the rising floor on air. Not pulling her head this way and that, as he'd done when they kissed, he cupped and fluffed her wild hair.

What a surface they had found to skim. What obscenities lay undiscovered, and what an affair they might conduct, if they so chose: the mad king and a fool. Belemir would kill him. Andreth might be a wanton old woman, but she was Belemir's favorite niece. King that Finrod was, he let her step up on his foot, where kissing was only deeply impractical. It was like all her energy went to answering his weakness. The more he gave way, the more she needed to pin him, and drew new strength from his long welcome.

That meant a trap. With Finrod, always a trap, as he awaited the moment to speak. She looked forward to it. He was made for marriage, and a love between equals, the minds to link like hands; he would be left wanting while she took all she could hold. The gulf that she had always feared would let her pity him. But his uncertain, burning focus—the fleeting smiles when she pulled away, that had to stand for his sturdy good cheer—made it apparent that he felt no lack. She for her part was slowed by vague concern. Or not slowed, not slowed enough: her rushing-forth rebounded on her, she frothed with possibilities, went nowhere and in every direction, and wanted to unbuckle his belt. Her arm had gone numb. She whacked it several times against the wall beside his head.

That jarred his eyes open, briefly. He didn't take his tongue out of her mouth. He caught her wrist blind, fumbled around it to squeeze her numb hand—he was always taking her hand. It was presumptuous.

Something trickled from her ear, and at the same time, thicker, over her lip.

He felt it and strove to disentangle himself. She let him get her to arm's length, though she used their linked hands against him. Blood slid sweet down the back of her throat as she sucked in a deeper breath.

“My harp,” he said, giving up without seeming to notice what restrained him. “Andreth, my—”

The hand in his was all through pins and needles. The hand that closed around his throat could feel, and so she did feel the brittleness there, suspended in flesh. His voicebox. Not another word from him but forced-out air. The savagely pink eyes were brighter now than sorrow burned, his whole face glittered, outlined like a pearl—although he was dimmed from when he had held vigil over her, and over Eilinel. Her hand partook of the shine. When he did spill tears, it startled her badly; without thinking she clamped down.

He made a noise that was not like speech, but which contained a note of inquiry, distorted by how he had to widen it. She fought back the pure agitation of not understanding. Dread that he might be right, and that she was deceived, crowded against that unrest: _what could he mean_? His short nails scrubbed at the back of her hand, then he locked onto her wrist. The unbodily, exorbitant strength, which she had experienced in glancing reminders, like the drooping sky that seemed to stroke the scalp before a storm, now ground her bones together. But she could still use her purpled hand. And did, with pleasure; he kicked out, and the shock of his weight should have broken her hold, but she leaned into the work.

His eyes rolled back. For as long as she held on, she felt as though she were learning something, which as a shape in darkness she could only wait to see. It strained her eyes. In the back of her mind she was thinking about his voice when he asked for his harp; and about the soreness there still was between her legs. She couldn't wait, couldn't see, was afraid of the shape and the dark—she wrapped her hand around the level of his temples and slammed his head on the wall. Once, twice. Released him and licked blood from her lip. He dropped to his knees and fell into her, sliding to the floor once she stumbled back. When she kicked him over, and crouched down to correct for a slight blurring in her vision, his face was slack.

Asleep? _Asleep_? Without any words, straightening, she sang out—sang the question. In lieu of a reply, she got just her dense relief. She should have tried to break it apart; she scrabbled at it, and instead it pressed on the yielding stuff of her fear. He would not stir. What was sung, surely, was true, not for the length of the song but forever; she only had to change the future, it would keep mending itself.

She stooped again to take the harp, which tipped down to her fingers before she did more than touch the side of the bed. With her good hand, the one not tingling and blind, she played a scale: he had thought to make his diagnosis that way, but all she heard was a good, full tone, that let the tears flock thickly to her eyes. When she blinked the trapped tears threatened, not quite stinging. Every draught of air rattled her chest. Her face hadn't grown hot, and mere constancy was a chill, particularly as the tears tugged out, dropped down, tugged off. But in all other respects it was how conversations had ended with Finrod ten years ago. Costly, unsustainable sympathy, that bore her away without asking permission, until it subsided without her consent. An utter loss, even a theft, because the land lay dead where the flood had passed.

That made her wish to say something to hurt him. How had she found him agreeable before? She had thought he would help her, of course. He lay there, a bloody patch in fine hair, wrists crossed, and his sharp nose bending on the floor. There was no trespass, no appeal, across the gulf and doom Finrod revered: only an adjustment of instruments, brought point by point into vying accord.

One further kiss. It wasn't an instrument she had had ten years ago. Possibly if the demon had been in him, it would have mattered; but nothing went out of her, she felt more full for the attempt. Well, she reasoned, am I Andreth, if that lady would have defended him? But am I less Andreth if I test his defenses, to aid my own work? As she thought it, she switched her grip on the harp, worked her rubbery hand around eight or nine strings, and yanked.

It hurt incredibly. It was curious to contrast to the numbness, because here her hand had vanished in a bright blaze of sense. And reemerged, translucent, under pain's fading glare, not at first enough like flesh to risk moving, when it might crack. The other strings she broke one at a time. With every twang she expected her hand to transform again, but she got only twinges, that took up no room—the ache so separate it should have had a knot's size, to dig out.

A cold voice interrupted these interesting reflections. It said, you must bring Eilinel and Ingrim back.

It was the same voice she hadn't been able to place before, whether it belonged to her or the spirit. Now her doubt had spread to so much of her body, to the foot that tapped unbidden and the tightness in her throat, that she considered words an almost welcome intrusion: she could disregard or obey them as she chose. And the truth was that the spirit had never been her only enemy.

Eilinel, and her fainthearted father. They'd ride out with a warning, soon if not already. If not caught. Only now did she see how unlikely Finrod's task had been. He must have impressed that on them; he was arrogant, but not so proud as that. Ingrim would have Finrod's horse ready, wherever in the warm forest they hid. Finrod had worked with her before to fight outbreaks of plague, which had been exhausting, and less exhausting than playing the plague would be. But that wasn't what she was going to do. She had to live, but she would stay away from her people: go west, maybe, into the deep woods. She could live alone, like this, as easily as alone and hale. But not if she was hunted.

Ingrim's son would seek him. She kept inventing, then inching back, new complications: Ingrim's son would seek him, Ingrim's wife would not. As though one person's pride could hold back another's love. Andreth had often worried how men's strife seemed, to elves. An animal, scratching itself in the trap. She had also thought, you could pity anyone who would eventually end, and the sooner the better. The feuding princes of the Noldor had no such recourse. They saw not resemblances, but differences, which might be interesting, but were not true. Had they any knowledge of each other beyond what were, after all, only accidents? Like all memory was an accident; like it had to be, because forgetting was. But how could she ask?

She would have broken the harp if it were wood. Strings broken, it smiled with a winning crookedness. She eased it between Finrod's arm and his side. Curled like that, he might have fallen to protect it, and damaged it falling.

The cold hearth. He had done everything he could, not to light it.

The stack of firewood would have been taller in winter, but here was plenty for her modest purpose. She built the fire carelessly, singing as she worked; it singed _her_ fingers, flaring up. There was _athelas_ bundled on the hearthstones beside the ewer and half-full pot. She flung the sheaf onto the flames, and had to shield her face from the smoke.

Out at last to escape it. The soaking door-curtain was gritty to the touch. Sure enough, a neat gray pillar rose from the scrub-thatched roof; soon even someone hiding in the trees might see it. She ought to hide, or arm herself. Instead she stepped out of her shoes. The rain had turned the creek's flat banks to mud, which took a moment to collapse under her, as though she had deliberated over a choice. The swollen creek flowed on too fast for sky's ice-blue to form in sheets. The sky, too, seemed to be flying, as wind drove off the cloud-pack. That wind neither rose nor gave respite, but she was immersed in a breathing-pattern: the land rose indolently out of shade, and fell again.

The goat pen built above the bank, to the left of the dugout, held just goats; both her and Finrod's horses were gone. Ought she seek to vent the spirit into a family of goats? No, they were stronger-willed than she. The sun, dimly punched through the patchwork sky, gave her a short soft shadow. Sometimes Finrod went about with a shadow like a beheaded man's, the glow of his face reproduced on the ground, gliding before him, light from a place compared to which high noon was a low canopy. He thought of everything backwards. What if he had told them the smoke was a signal for something gone wrong? Cause to bring help, reinforcements, or _his brothers_ —

That he would not have asked. But it bit her feet like cinders, trodden ash, and she circled before the low arch of the door. The sun didn't hurt, she didn't _hate the sun_. She heard the wolf she also was, paws crushing soft behind her. He had black paws. Black fur with a blue sheen, the blue-spangled soft dark that stuffed her eyes. He didn't pant, but she knew his height from the height of his whistling breath.

Why wait? If Eilinel and Ingrim were somewhere in the woods, could she not find them?

She took quick steps to the creek's edge and stopped just shy of entry. She had been told, no, she remembered: for all Finrod's talk of ships and decks, the first shape of this land had been a great flat circle, ringed by ocean. A lake at the center. The moor beyond the creek was hidden by the slight elevation of the banks, but she had walked it so often that knowledge raised it like a drawbridge: a creaking span of purple heather, hauled above horizon's moat. But she didn't need to crank the ocean into view. It ringed _her vision_ : Ekkaia, and the walls of night. And there was the creek, much less than that, and she put in a foot, felt the cold pulling, and hopped out. It wasn't obvious what she had to fear from the crossing. Not, certainly, departure from the circles of reality. But of Eilinel's sickness, Ingrim had said, she lay speaking by the fire a day and a night, using strange language: when she spoke as herself, she said, I heard a voice from off the water. She only fell silent when you drew near. When her brother had long since gone for help.

Andreth thought, I may not die in water, and pollute the stream.

Besides, the smoke was drifting south; they must be south of her to see it. She turned her back. Without the cowardice she had learned to move in, since growing old, and growing proud, she dug handholds out of the soft earth of the bank. She scrambled up it, skirting the dugout. As she climbed, she had, also, to double back and find her reasoning. The moor exposed, the forest not so dense as to breed terrors—Ingrim would have stayed near the edge, she need not search far in—but her heart remained with the arch of the smoke, and she thought seriously of how she might ride it, till it bent down to their eyes. Like a bough at harvest-time. She was still planning along hearth story lines when she passed under the eaves, and began to run.

It was not less fanciful. She floated like a deer at the top of its bound, received strength from the cushiony resistance in all movement, fell and was tossed up by her stride. She had run like this before. No, she had never. The tips of brambles scored her feet. No way for a wise-woman to travel, though the trees blew past. The walls were falling in, her on her back. Without being crushed by loose timbers, she approached a gorge; she feared, half-hoped, that she would make the preposterous leap. At the last moment, however, her feet veered toward a fallen tree, which she danced across.

“Eilinel!” she called. “Eilinel!”

Every pale movement was the girl. She almost snatched an owl out of midair, and had to scrape white feathers from her palm. She had grown, more than winded, bemused, and she weaved from her sword-straight path, which had been unlike anything within these trackless woods.

Help, she tried without speaking, thinking how Eilinel, who had also suffered this, must hear. _Help_ me. Her heart slammed at her breastbone like a slave buried alive, and because she walked, now, her feet rolling off the earth, her face burned as though she had run the while ahead of her blood, and now her face filled, and it thinned, and her blood still rushed forward. Oh, help, she thought. Finrod said it: I am dead. But that would have been better. If she'd already died, and this was all—and she felt such a longing, to know that this was all; this time that was like life, except it burned. In all her numerous escapes she had split the last hard hull. Nothing stood between her and the flame: it was only because she was so much to burn, that she still was. Safe, if only, safe and dead, and she fumbled a hand over her heart, which pleaded in its turn to be let free.

Craven thing.

She had reached a crest beyond which blue glimmered between alder trees, and the slope scooped steeply down to where the blue began. She went skating over undergrowth. Ha, ha, ha, she wheezed, and the lake flowered out of the gaps, her uncontrolled descent to it as much as the coming of spring.

Then she really laughed. Its harshness disappointed her: a bark of a laugh, when she felt like ringing! because the center, the clear lake, had survived after all. Though the land was broken, and the ocean swept through. There had been a wedding, under the two lamps. Why, there was much she could report, who had already been, among her friends, the spy.

But this was Tarn Aeluin. Therefore her knees buckled, and she caught a hand around a slim trunk, to halt her steps before she reached the shore. Therefore, also, its beauty: day touched the cider-color shallows with milky spots like an agate stone. Outside the shade, kingfisher blue. Had she spoken of flowers? It rose and flapped before her. It dazzled like a sky of birds, it parlayed light into some music. Kingfishers, she reminded herself, didn't flock. She shot out her hand and curled back a fist, the sort of tact she had shown with the owl. In the hours between sundown and this, she had lost the name Aeluin.

That was madness, if an inviting madness. So too the delight she had felt on coming on the lake. Those two lamps—the eyes of the wolf? The lamps dwindled, went out, flared to die again, each time redder, more like lights she had known. The other memories had receded beyond understanding, had drained away though she held them cupped.

She was thinking in this way because her bare feet were submerged. The tree had slipped away. Her dress pooled at the level of her ankles, and would soon gain a fringe of new green leaves: they bobbed against and stuck to the wool. Water made a heavy fetter, but it burst when she fell to her knees. She was held by the lake, seeping under her thighs, sealed out when she sat back. Her blue shadow on waves had gained some snaking definition. Without any thought, without the proper rites— _I am Andreth, accounted wise_ —without the wariness that was the next best thing to being blind, she looked down and flinched.

There was one thing she could do. Miserable, shaking now, water of such a penetrating smoothness that dry skin felt caked on—she called on her beloved. She whispered his name in defiance. Her shoulder came alive with impatience, it strove to be touched.

If they had married, she would be alone. Right now. She had meant all her promises—not to beg, not to limp after—yet the thought drove her almost mad. She should have been ashamed, having her greed made naked. But she thought, why is he not with me? He should be. If not then, then now.

Then for a long while she thought very little; her thoughts had grown so cruel they devoured each other. She had found the part of Andreth that was true. Grief sifted out her senses, her reason—chaff the demon ate. She choked on her life, the pure grain. She had provoked herself to such sorrows before—had sat by while her throat filled— but in this case there was too much to punish, and her body challenged her, calming unbidden. _Yes, and?_

It was like trying to fall asleep in the heat. She sank beneath safe powerlessness: any strength could have moved her, but she was alone.

Then Aegnor strode into her mind. He moved in thought as she did on the water, like a whip. His smile, his keen grace, forced her head down to meet the stranger. The bloody-mouthed witch. “Imposter!” she cried. “Usurper!” The mask of drying blood cracked on her cheeks.

Aegnor had always seen her as she had seen herself. He had left without a word—or, if he sent word, it was so little she had raged, and worn the page through with reading, and forgotten it. All Finrod's explanations were counter to his purpose, because he robbed her that this stranger should have nothing to steal. The maiden, starved, doubted to death, though she had been fair—with his help, she would cheat her murderer. Why not? Why let Andreth the hag usurp the maid—why let her crouch, enthroned, as a crow in carrion? Having no power to spare her life, Aegnor had safeguarded her pride: the choice she would have made, had they not met. If he had erred, she could forgive him, and for a moment she was deliriously happy.

What is that to me? Aegnor seemed to ask, through the muzzling smile. What good is that? It was Aegnor, then Aegnor and another: and herself. Must we go? said the voice that spoke thus coldly, every time. Must we pass together from the circles of the world? You could release me.

Patience! it added, in another tone.

She started to swim.

She didn't at first know what argument she was having, so she did as had long been her custom, and attended to sound. Here, the slapping and popping of waves. She had been stretched, not merely from toes to fingertips, or out to her hair that tugged on its roots, but to the spray that rained back down. Her body got ahead of her, it grew profusely from the stem—her body like stiff wings, that magnified her least intention. She didn't know she leaned until she dipped. Mocking herself, she said to herself, My wolf has jumped in after me. She swam faster. Her dress billowed, then filled up as with stones. In minutes she was struggling, had to fight the web of waves, and with that came her answer: She couldn't release the spirit. It had bound itself to her.

Tell me, it replied, were you always this? The lamps, the stream, the low room in the hill? What have you not left—and yet you live. Being so, teach me to flee! If we cannot part. Lead me after you!

How it lied. She pushed her head underwater, like that would stop her ears. Beneath the surface the thoughts came faster, and she couldn't unwind its arrogance from hers. She had planned to die, and kill the demon. How had she planned it? Weakness and madness, madness and grief. Weakness alone had been enough in Eilinel. But Eilinel had slept without waking, she had heard no entreaty. No wonder Finrod had shown mercy to Andreth, for as long as she was awake. Anyone who listened could be tricked.

What was the trick?

If only she might, as Finrod had once suggested, abandon Andreth, forgive Andreth, and be an obstacle overcome. If she were not her body. If she could in no part be destroyed.

As always, the thought that there were two deaths. The death others dared, the utter darkness, and the death she might choose, which was a pouring-out. From the little vessel to the larger. Such a flight was all advantages, except that this body would walk from the bottom of the lake to the shore. Without her to torment, it would devote itself to other victims. She tried to think why that mattered. Beril: it showed her Beril laughing. Beril laughed much around her older sister. She strangled Beril. And Bregor, and Adanel, the last gold stripped from her white hair: why not? The thing was testing, now. It pushed hard, made her head a storm of loves. Had she loved them? Would she _risk_ them? It wasn't even taunting her, it seemed to give a choice. She grew defiant. Yes, she thought, at once. Anything, as not to die with you.

Aegnor last. He was engulfed in flame. She really saw him, now farther, now nearer, and she agreed with amazement, learning late of her mistake. It was too late! With the demon, she had been strong, and could have sought him out. She could have argued with him boldly; reminded him of what Finrod had claimed. He had desired to flee away with her, and, to be sure, she was withered, she was mad, but having once seen her again, could he refuse? Though there was the matter _of_ Finrod, crumpled to the floor. She knew how Aegnor loved his brother. Once he had said to her, You are worse than him.

That was an exaggeration, which she would have chided him for now, had she not been drowning. He stood with her over his brother's body; he had given her what she never wanted. With reluctance, she found she had to do as he would ask.

Yes. Yes. I will not save you from the fire.

With that it had to be content. She could think of nothing else to trade away.

It seemed to know very well how to die already. She was being torn in half. She would be razed, too swiftly to grow back. There was a lie flesh always told, waiting until she fell silent—she could refute it, and when she stopped for breath, it would repeat itself, in an aside. It said past silence: you are well. You will be well! The lie only went out in pain like this. A pain so close, it couldn't get nearer: she touched the edge of it, then it was moving off her mind. As it went she did. Out, out.

 

Then Andreth's spirit fell into darkness, and she dreamed.

The dream had an intensity she never found after. The ink of her death separated into colors, and revealed itself to be composed of many brilliances.

She came to rest on a pale road, which burned her feet. It was a hot blue evening, greener nearer land. In the north a black shape rose forever. It was the serpent; it was the wolf. Its neck flung aside the foam-fair stars. Now was the time to hope, or ask for help—help of any sort. She waited, instead, without hope, wondering what would happen.

The wolf spread its wings. In its belly were the swallowed sun and moon. The heat came from them, and the smell like an early thaw; here it was winter. The road was a frozen river. Andreth felt a grief and a joy so swift that she couldn't study either, and had to look, with interest, at the ice. Thus her first view of the person approaching from the south was of his feet.

Further up, she had an unpleasant shock: he wore a helm shaped like the serpent. Seeing her distress he took it off, fumbling one-handed with the clasps, and bowed to her. At which she thought, Kinsman. He could have been Adanel's son, grown to manhood: he had the lean height of men of the House of Marach, and the dark beard and polished skin of a prince of her own family.

A woman came behind him down the road. She walked briskly, but her fair, stiff, damp-and-drying hair floated like she ran, or was falling, or like she burned at one end; and she took the man's helmet, turning it in her hands. “Aunt,” she said, turning to Andreth, at the same time as the man said, “Grandmother.” Then Andreth had to laugh, and wipe her tears before they fell; and the man said, “Are you here to point the way?”

“The way!” she cried. “Is he not before you? Or is he grown too great for you to see?”

Her kinsman shrugged. In his left hand, a long black sword, which he swung like a walking stick. His sister glanced at him in merriment. Andreth, sensible of some duties, leaned up and kissed the girl's cheek, and kissed the young man's forehead, holding his head low enough to reach. His ear a little red when she released it. She had not till then given any thought to what had brought her there, but it was a great comfort to kiss friends without fear.

They ran, and she walked in the other direction. The level of the river changed gradually, but the walls of a ravine shot up. Then the sky had tipped onto its edge. She stood between two discs, the rim of the deep and the rim of the dark: a world hung over this world, so low it could be reached. That was none of her concern, however. The current drummed dully, deep under cold, and she followed it, until the ice broke.

 

Andreth rolled to her side, choking.

Aegnor had a hand on her shoulder. Another hand pounded her sternum. But no, it was impossible: she had turned from the dragon. Aegnor gave battle to the north.

Andreth opened her mouth so far the water fell out of its own accord. “ _The demon_?”

Finrod pointed behind him. Over Aeluin, the Blue-mere, steam hung in banners. It made the wood a weaving. Water hallowed by Melian! Andreth coughed up more of it.

When she only wanted very much to vomit, she said, “I was so afraid it would—know. But it didn't feel it at all. Our holy place.”

“Do you still claim to feel fear?” His voice had lost all its sweetness. His wetted hair formed spikes; his skin was boiled pink. A blood vessel had burst in one eye, painting the white like a dancer's nail. She tried to sit and he shoved her down, though with exaggerated care. When he spoke again his lips didn't move, though the voice was still harsh. “Of course it didn't feel it. It had you to feel for it. Why do you think I didn't take you here? This wasn't what we agreed.”

They had agreed on nothing in particular. The last memory, the time she'd lost, lay waiting in his mind. Midnight, and Andreth sick as a dog. _Andreth_ came to Finrod, and whispered in his ear. She had fought him, kissed him, and something like a serpent of smoke poured from her mouth, until he said a word, and grasped the coil.

After, the candle. Her face banded with grainy shade and light, like the lake on a darker day—the lake in winter. What had she told him? _Trust me._ And fallen back at once into her swoon.

He had thought to repeat the feint, and with unguarded trust lure out the evil.

He was unguarded now. She fled the vault, hearing, not the sense of his thoughts, but their living sound, sliding over knowledge. It wasn't like his sendings, he couldn't make her look, but the lure was great: she had to let her fear for him buffet her away, out of the caverns. How had he hoped to deceive anyone, with his open, stubborn stare? He wasn't old, for one of his kind. Someone's lover, someone's son. That thought she had as penance, and found soothing: he wasn't hers. But he hadn't deserved to die in such a way, helping his friend.

And there was knowledge that would have been lost. She had been careless even with her own store. That dream, that radiant dream! She ought to take more students. Not only Finrod, who was losing a war. Under the trees of Eldamar his betrothed might laugh—and laughing, weep, being regaled: Finrod would use Andreth's own words, he would say that a mortal had wanted to kill him, and all meaning would alter when, forgiven, he returned. That was well, but it was not wisdom. Andreth had been a poor steward. It was hard, heart high, to feel the weight of her error, when without shedding it, she had been lightened.

She said, “It was what you dreamed. Finrod.” And when that didn't work: “Lord, let me—”

He took her fingertips down from his bruised neck without touching her, by smiling. “It's no Nauglamir,” he said. “But I will wear it preeningly.”

She cast about for some question to clothe her bare concern. “Eilinel?” Eilinel had seemed to lead her through the wood; Finrod must have been close behind her, to save her; perhaps he too had had a guide? She was already tender toward the girl, whom she'd saved, and at one point plotted to kill—she would gladly be grateful to her.

“Safe at home. Ingrim brought me.”

At the use of his name, Ingrim stepped into view, leading Andreth's mare. Andreth wondered if he'd noticed that Finrod wasn't speaking aloud, but Ingrim seemed more inclined to scrutinize Andreth. “My lord,” he said, and as an afterthought, “Wise lady. Might I take my leave? It's a ways on foot, and my daughter needs feeding.”

So do I! Andreth nearly cried, but her authority hung enough askew already. She nodded instead, and he let go of the reins, giving the mare's sweat-shiny neck a pat.

“I'll have your son sent home to you,” Andreth said. Ingrim's brows drew together.

“If you can winkle him out,” he said, and ducked his head in what she took for sullenness, until he smiled.

Then they were alone. The mare went solemnly grazing, but declined to drink. Finrod fell back, and the movement pushed Andreth's eyes up the trees.

“Where's _your_ horse?”

“He may be taking it as payment.”

“Will he call on our services again, do you think?

“I think he thought we'd smoked hash in his house.”

The _athelas_ back in her hands, unburnt. It hadn't even been her, and she remembered it so well; the time between had broken like a seal, revealing freshness. In connection to those leaves, she saw many other things. This was why I won, she thought dimly, trying to give a reason, not for her success, but for the fullness that came only now, after she'd risked it. Surely, she was too much to die. But everything could end at once, and be swallowed in the same instant. So, in that case... but... She felt her face grow warm.

“It woke me,” Finrod offered. “It and Eilinel. They came in when they saw the smoke. I must tell you, I have noticed your people do not take direction well.”

“How can you say that? I waited for you.”

“You—” She'd gotten him to turn his head, from the sound of crushed bracken. “You started swimming when I called your name.”

“Why did you do that?”

A silence, in which she reflected that she was being cruel. He hadn't accepted her care. He said, “You waited for me. So it could have gone worse.”

“Better, too, I grant you.”

He snorted. First she thought it was the horse. She got up on one elbow, then sat up when he didn't speak. “You said—you _told me_ —The other victims. Others have thrown off this curse before?”

“No, _adaneth_ ,” he said with his real voice, the rasp of it not scraping the last fondness from the word. Then in thought-speech again: “No one has ever defeated a demon by force of will.”

It hadn't been that hard. Sickened, almost, and without thinking: “I wouldn't call it will.”

“Oh? Tell me!” Off her look: “I must name your weapons, to make a song of praise. Not 'will.' Well, not all wars are. Were you held, then? By love, and loyalty, and bonds of kin?”

“Not quite.” She laced her hands. “I had to make it take both sides of the argument.”

He made a questioning noise, but what she heard was, _No one else_. He hadn't had, at any point, the courtesy to sound surprised. What had he seen? The wind had died, and the lake was so like memory that it was leached of substance. Everywhere but where the steam decayed it.

And yet, and then—the scene shone steadily, though hollowly. The wick was sheathed in void, the void in color. Aegnor was alive now. She had felt him with her, which was all she had wanted. The thought ran through her once and was lost in a throng, which ran jumping, turning, crowing, faster and more fierce when she pretended to be still. The shearing fault, the place to stand; she wished Finrod still doubted her, so she could feel again how sure she was.

She was half-dry. Hunger formed a load in her belly. Her dress was unsalvageable, and clung, but she felt her skin less and less—when she moved it swept back, however, like chasing the shine down a blade. She looked down at Finrod. She saw that, though not surprised, he felt disabling relief; his fear had mastered him, and he lay now as a captive loosed, whose limbs wouldn't obey. It was true she wasn't much better off. Her hands ran up her arms in starts: she had sunk that far, rising was the only rest. But where was his hope? Not just for Arda, but for her! Their friendship still to be renewed. Without sharing that hope, Andreth knew of it; they had built it, and she had given it to him. She was sorely aggrieved to find he'd left it by the wayside. That was what came of great haste.

She should have shied from touch, remembering all she had done; but, forgetful, she gave Finrod her hand. Like a child feigning sickness, he pressed it to the side of his face. He must have been exhausted. She couldn't let him sleep.

She had destroyed his beautiful harp, so she chose another method. “Ask me to sing.”

"Please."

Easier than rising was lifting her raw voice. Andreth praised the sun, the stars in summer, which had always been others' loves. You look at nothing for itself, he’d said, and she had known her people better. Though now the sun pierced her eyes. It wasn't enough; she had to have it. Love nothing for itself, she almost sang, knowing that when he healed, he might sing it back to her.


End file.
